In
the 1930s Wivenhoe’s industries were in trouble. Wivenhoe's upstream
shipyard was not working for most of the 1920s and 1930s, and population
fell from 2400 in 1901 to 2100 in 1931. So the old sense of social
hierarchy and distance was reinforced by poverty, unemployment and poor
housing, which was then concentrated in lower Wivenhoe.

Workers and
bosses: W. G. Loveless and the gravel pit

- Walter Wix

That was a feature
of the employment treatment by Mr Loveless, of his workforce. Even before
the War they used to go on an outing of some sort, every year. I didn’t
join in until 1937 and I went into the Navy in 1940, but in the meantime I
think the outings that I went on concerned football matches, because Mr
Loveless’s nephews were Leslie and Dennis Compton, and they both played
for Arsenal. So we visited Highbury to watch a particular football match
as an outing, and probably went to the theatre or something afterwards. It
was all very well done, and these outings, we went all over the place. We
went to Hampton Court, Southend was a venue that we went to a couple of
times. But it wasn’t as though we went empty-handed, we were all given
pocket money to go to spend. So we were treated very well.

Again another
feature of Mr Loveless’s generosity was at Christmas. Now, he used to
set a lot of store by Christmas..The land that was fallow, or the land
that was not being used for gravel extraction, we used to farm. And while
WG was still active he farmed it. Later years, like with the 54 acres and
the 19 acres on the Lennox side, we had an arrangement with the local
farmers that they farmed the land, they paid us a rent for farming it. But
at that time, Mr Loveless was responsible for farming and we used to keep
bullocks and pigs and chickens and things, and one of the things at
Christmas, he always made sure that everybody had a Christmas dinner.

And again,
initially, before the War brought rations and things like that, he
allocated one of the bullocks, one of the butchers who bought the beef
would provide beautiful joints, so that every man had a beef joint for
Christmas. And then when it got so that, of course, there were
restrictions and that, all right, poultry, but everybody had a turkey or a
chicken. And apart from that he also used to provide a draw of toys and
chocolates and things for the family. And always a great do just before we
broke up for Christmas, with all these chickens or the joints and that
sort of thing, all laid out with their names on, and then we’d have the
draw for the presents, chocolates, or the toys. He made a great thing of
children and buying little things of interest, and out of the ordinary
sort of things so that everybody with a family, whether it was just a wife
or whatever, had an additional prize to take home at Christmas. W G
Loveless was a good employer. He looked after his personnel but what he
expected from you was loyalty, and a good day’s work for a good day’s
pay.

From village
paternalism deeper in rural Essex

- Ralph Moss

Away from the
coast, Ralph was born in1913
in Colne Engaine, coming to Wivenhoe in 1936 as base for his grocery round
in the villages. He had a tough start. His father, a farm worker on
Courtauld family estate, had died, leaving 11 children. But Miss Katherine
Courtauld made sure all the children were sent off to the kind of jobs she
thought appropriate: the girls to service, and Ralph to sea.

Miss Courtauld was
very good to us. She came down to see my mother and said that she would
make sure, they would get a job somewhere. The girls were working at the
silk factory in Halstead, and gradually they all went off to service in
Golders Green. My brothers went into the forces, and one became a teacher.
And I got a job on the Cutty Sark. I went off to the Cutty Sark
when I was 14.

I was more or less
pushed into it. Because when it was my turn to leave school, Miss
Courtauld sent the bailiff down, and I had to report to her at 10
o’clock on Friday morning, into her study. I was mandated to go and see
her. And I went in for audience, afraid to speak hardly, as usual in those
days! I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to do. And she said,
‘Would you like to go to sea? A training ship?’ And as a last resort,
I said, ‘Yes, Miss, I’ll do that.’ So I saw her on the Friday and on
the Monday, I was pushed off to Falmouth Harbour. I had nothing with me.
We had nothing, only what we stood up in, really, in those days.

Laughing at the
mistress

- Annie Skilton

Eveline Cox came and asked
Bob for a job and he said, ‘Yes, you can start on Monday.’ Well, she
started. And what she told us made us roar with laughing! She was a
lady’s companion in London! And of course she used to look after a lady
and they had a butler and everything. Well, anyhow, one day the family she
worked for were going away for the weekend. They went away and the next
day all the maids and that said, ‘We’re going to have a splash up meal
now they’re away.’ Well, they had a splash up meal – and the family
walked in! They walked in! The butler and they all had the sack! Eveline
said, ‘We had all the silver out,’ she said. ‘Had a lovely meal
ready,’ she said, ‘and they walked in!’ Oh, we didn’t half laugh
about that! There was things like that we used to talk about.

Attitude to upper
classes

- Dave Weatherall
(c. 1940s-50s)

My father-in-law Mr Gibson
was in Colchester walking up towards the Regal cinema, and from behind
him, ‘Hey, you!’ – as loud as that. ‘Hey, you!’ He said to me,
‘I took no notice, I carried on,’ he was telling us. ‘Hey, you!
I’m talking to you.’ He said, ‘Me? You’re talking to me?’ The
other man said, ‘That’s right. Where is Magdalen Street. Do you know
where it is?’ Gibson said, ‘Yes, I know where it is. But I’m
certainly not telling you.’ So the other man said, ‘Do you know who I
am? I’m the Chief Inspector of Suffolk Police.’ Gibson said, ‘Yes,
and I’m Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘find your own way to the place.’
But he said, if he’d have said to me, like anybody else would, ‘Excuse
me,’ he said, ‘I’d have turned round and said, ‘Certainly,’ and
told him.’ He didn’t like it. He said, ‘He didn’t like it.’ But
if Mr Gibson was talking to you or anything you’d think, ‘What a
gentleman!’

The local elite

- Halcyon Palmer

I think my mother [Margery
Dean, wife of the village doctor] was quite nervous of [the local gentry]
and I don’t think they socialised very much. I don’t mean not at all
but I think they had their own circle of friends, and I think didn’t
really socialise, I wouldn’t say, with the gentry an awful lot. But, on
the other hand, when the War came, it was all hands to the pump, and then
they did mix with, for example, the Gooches and people, because everybody
was pulling together, yes. Indeed. I think they were really regarded, both
of them, as slightly eccentric. I’m not sure, but I think! She certainly
was eccentric! Yes, I think she was a bit of a shock to [Wivenhoe people]
to be honest. I think it was quite a conventional little place, and I
think they were really the beginnings of it being a little bit less
conventional.

What the Rector or the doctor said

-

Halcyon
Palmer

Churches now are much more
relaxed. We always used to wear hats and the whole thing has changed
completely. I mean, much for the better too. We’ve got a very nice
Rector now, I think he’s a great asset. But I think rectors always have
played a large part, really, in a small community. Don’t forget, going
back to when I was little, there wouldn’t have been very many educated
people in a place of this size. There were a few, of course, but there
weren’t very many places where you could turn to for help. And I think
very much what the Rector said, or what the doctor said, was black and
white! If he said it, it was so. And I think that’s what’s changed a
lot. I think, now, we question everything, don’t we. And I think both
doctors and ministers of any kind must have an awful struggle because
it’s no longer like that.

You made yourself
smart

- Joyce Blackwood

The Post Office was on the
corner of Queen’s Road, right on the corner. And Mr Goodwin, who kept it
when I was little, was also the agent for our three terraced houses. He
used to collect the rent and it was a big event. My father, when he was at
home, used to dress up to go and pay the rent. You know, you made yourself
smart.

1960s: the
Nottage and yacht owners

- Bill Ellis

Really, the whole thing was
run, very largely - I can only describe Wivenhoe, at that time, in the
late 1960s, as a squirearchy. You were either part of the very small upper
Wivenhoe squirearchy or Mafiosi or you weren’t! And there was a great
social divide between the two, which was rather sad. But anyway the
Mafiosi did, very much, keep everything to themselves, and they wanted
things run just their own way. For instance, the mud berths in front of
the Nottage appeared to me to be let out to someone, ‘You can put your
boat in there, and don’t forget, you can come and do a little job for
me,’ something of that sort. This style of thing, you see.

`My family’s in
trade’

-

Bill
Ellis

At
that time, living in the house next door here, West House, just behind
where you’re sitting, we had Lady Sophie Kier lived there, and she is
the daughter of the Marquis of Anglesey of course! And she’s really Lady
Elizabeth Sophia Learmont-Paget, daughter of the Marquis of Anglesey, and
we got on quite well with her and so forth. She’d rented the place,
because Robin, her husband, had got some shipping interest or something
down at Harwich at the time. Anyway, we were walking along West Street
with Lord Palmer, and I said, ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Do you happen
to know the Earl of Uxbridge?’ I said, ‘Lady Sophie Kier lived in
here.’ And he said, ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘Well, I know him vaguely,’
he said, ‘But,’ he said, ‘don’t have a lot to do with him,’ he
said. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘my family’s trade, you know. They go back to the 1500s!’

Poverty: a strong
Socialist

- Halcyon Palmer

She [Margery Dean] was a
Scholarship pupil at a school where most of the children came from quite
affluent homes, and her mother had had to make her uniform, as distinct
from the tailor-made ones from the outfitters that the richer children
wore, and I think this gave her an inferiority complex really, in a way,
that lasted her for the rest of her life, and was really the seed on which
her strong Socialist beliefs was planted, really. Certainly when she went
to university, she became quite involved with a lot of Debating Societies
and so forth, and I think she very much enjoyed pitting her wits and her
ideas against other people of intellectual thoughts. And I think, after
her family were born, and a little bit off her hands, that is really why
she became interested in Left-wing politics.

The other thing you have to
remember is that there was quite a lot of poverty here in this little
village, there were a lot of people who really didn’t earn a lot of
money, and didn’t have very nice houses in which to live, they were
cottages without bathrooms and so on and so forth, and I think she felt
that they deserved a better lot, really. [Dr Dean’s] practice was in the
lower part of the village, and so we were very used to the way that most
of the people who lived down there had to live. I think this might be what
partly fed it, as you might say.

Childhood
diet

- Marjorie
Goldstraw

We
ate all the wrong things. They hadn’t much money, sixpenny worth of meat
– an old sixpence – made the meat for a meat pudding. And, oh,
dumplings, and she’d go to the butchers and get a foot and hock, which
is a pig’s foot and hock, and make lovely pea soup. Well, I can taste it
now. Because meat was meat then, and the flavour was different. How she
did it I don’t know. And at Christmas time, one of the uncles who was
running the dairy which was in the shop next door then, in our time, they
used to bring a chicken up and things like that. And my uncle who ran the
coal business would shoot a bag of coal in the cellar. Things like that.
My mother had nothing to return because we were living hand to mouth.

Very economical

- Halcyon Palmer

They moved here in 1935,
when I was a few months old, and she made her own bread and all that sort
of thing. She was quite interested in cookery, but she was always very
economical about recipes and this sort of thing, and, in fact, I’ve
recently found a little pamphlet - she wrote a book on how to live on
almost no money, and apparently, for the first two years of their married
life, they actually tried to live on the sort of lowest wage that the men
then could earn, which would explain some of the ghastly things we
sometimes had to eat! Although, to be fair, she was quite a good cook! But
it was always very economical fare.

Hand-me-downs

- Ivy Knappett

Some people was ever so
poor. If, for instance I’d grown out of a dress or a coat and that, my
mother would tell somebody and say, ‘Well, you can have it for five
shillings.’ Five shillings was like - being in this house for five
shillings a week. And they’d have a coat off of my mother or my mother
would have a coat off of them. Really we didn’t have much new things, we
had somebody’s clothes. If our mothers got them cheap from somewhere we
used to think they were lovely, except you met somebody and they’d say,
‘Oh, the girl whatshername had that coat on last week.’

Family home

- Ivy Knappett

When you get up to as far as
Anglesea Road you go a little way, and there’s a hill down and a hill up
and we were born up there, on top of the hill. And that was only two
bedrooms, and two downstairs, that’s all it was. The kitchen was in the
living room. We had a coal-fire stove and everything on the top there –
you boiled your potatoes and your greens. On the top there was a black top
and you kept that black top on all the while because the heat went under
the oven. And the front room…oh, we mustn’t go in the front room
unless we had a party or anything like that!

Heating

- Joyce Blackwood

We had one fire in the
middle room and on high occasions another one in the front room if you
were lucky! But nothing else. We didn’t have any paraffin heaters or
anything like that, which a lot of people did. But there was a kitchen
range, so it served a purpose of heating and cooking. She used to cook by
that.

Poor families

- Tony Forsgate

We did country dancing at
school. We had to dance with the girls, obviously, but there were certain
girls that everyone tried to steer clear of! And the majority of those
lived down the street, close to the river. There was, in a way, a social
distinction. I mean, there was poverty, on a small scale in some parts of
Wivenhoe. They were mainly along what we call the Folly, the houses that
have now been converted. That’s possibly where the poorer families
lived. But I think when you’re a child you’re not aware of the
hardships that your parents have either gone through or actually are going
through. I know my father never received a large wage but my mother was
very good at handling money, because in those days the wives or the
mothers did not go out to work. Today it’s totally different. We’re in
a situation where women like to be independent and in some cases the
economics of this world force people both to go out in order to pay the
mortgage.

Children’s play

- Ivy Knappett

My dad earned good money
there [as a riveter], and my mother used to say, ‘Now, don’t you play
with so and so down there,’ no, they weren’t good enough for me, you
know! I’m only talking when we got a bit better in money, but when we
were poorer she let me play with anybody! She would rather we played with
somebody who was a bit well off, but not because they were dirty, just
because, you know, poor people played with poor people. Oh, the difference
in today, isn’t there!

School

- Ivy Knappett

At school, we were stuck at
the back if we had old clothes on. And then the people who’d got money,
their daughters was dressed nice, they were put in the front. But if we
had an old dress or anything, all of us was put at the back. Fancy doing
that! So if they had visitors in, they thought that the whole school was
nice, didn’t they? The rich was in the front, and the poor stuck up at
the back!

Gossip

- John Barton

[In Britannia
Crescent] we were all in each other’s houses all the time really, and
the women used to congregate in a house for tea or coffee or
whatever, in the mornings, and my mother wouldn’t get involved with it,
because they were just tittle-tattling most of the time, I think, and
gossiping about other people, so she wouldn’t get involved. But we used
to go along just for a bit of fun really, and take the mick out of them!

Helping each
other

-

Freda Annis

Granny used to do a lot of
needlework, and she was always making things. I can see her now, at her
machine. And I know one time – of course, I was only quite a kid – the
little kiddie that lived near us came round and she said could she go and
see his mother? So Granny went. She came back. She went to a cupboard up
on the stairs and she took out a skirt and she all unpicked it, washed all
the pieces, put on the line, and she was stitching away there in the
evening. And my mother said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘Well,
that little kid, one of those little kiddies next door has got to go to
school,’ she said, ‘on Monday. She hasn’t got any trousers for
him,’ so she made a pair of trousers for him. And she was like that. She
was always making things. But I’ve thought about it a lot and I thought,
‘Well, how many people would do that today?’

This woman’s parents lived
just a little way down the road and her father was always repairing things
and they had big old iron saucepans in those days and Granny said
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to ask Mr Enfield to do it for me,’
and when he brought it back he’d soldered it and that, so she said,
‘How much do I owe you?’ He said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you made a
pair of trousers for my little boy,’ he said, ‘I can’t charge you
anything for that.’ And I thought, ‘That’s how they helped each
other,’ you know.

Bender fish

-

Freda Annis

There was another old lady,
her eyesight was very bad. Her husband used to go fishing and he came up
one day and he said, ‘Hannah, could you go and see Celia? She wants a
little bit of needlework done.’ So she said, ‘Yes, course I will.’
So she wanted the sheets turned side to middle, that’s what they used to
do. And she was stitching away there. During the next week he came with a
little ‘bender fish,’ they used to have them on a little string, like
lovely little dabs, like little plaice. And he said, ‘You were good
enough to do a bit of needlework for Celia,’ he said, ‘So I know you
enjoy these.’ Well, I mean, that went a long way with people. That was a
very tasty meal. And that’s how people helped each other.